Offbeat Eats

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site, I’ve got a variety of ways that I discover the places that I review here on Offbeat Eats, and one of them is basically happenstance: I’ll be traveling someplace off my usual beat and notice a place, usually an old, established one, that’s got a long line out the door. That happened to me back in February: I had to drop off some equipment for work in Haverhill, MA, and on the way home to NH, the usual route, the “Loop Connector” between I-495 and I-93, was closed due to an accident, and my GPS directed me on a detour through downtown Methuen (which I’d hadn’t explored in a few years). My detour took me down Oakland Avenue, and as I approached Railroad Street, I was stuck at the traffic light for a cycle. My eye got drawn first to a small sign “Parking here for meat pies only,” followed by seeing a modest line of people waiting outside the door. Heck, I like meat pies, so I turned into the parking lot, parked, and got in line at Thwaites Market.

Early in our UK trip this year, we got on the train and headed out to far Eastern outskirts of London, to a very odd destination: the Crossness Pumping Station. Now decommissioned, for almost 100 years, the Crossness was a gigantic, steam-powered… sewage pump. It’s more interesting than it sounds, since it’s primarily an example (and possibly one of the best examples) of Victorian-era engineering in all of it’s overly-adorned awesomeness. After a rather long morning of touring gigantic flywheels, steam cylinders, giant brick galleries, and entire more elaborately painted cast iron than anyone thought possible, we were more than ready for some lunch. Taking the train back towards London, it was easiest for us to stop in Greenwich, and since we spent the morning experiencing old-school English engineering, this was a good opportunity to have a good, old-school English lunch of pie and mash, stopping off at Goddard’s at Greenwich.